In the past things were more casual, with the designers coming up with plans on their own based on design proposals they were sure would work and then trying to lobby the higher-ups. Some of the proposals that eventually reached the upper management and became products based on orders from the top down went on to be best sellers.

"t would be better to describe the 58mm lens as a concept that had been brewing for dozens of years that was finally released onto the market rather than something that was only thought up in the last one or two years. The 58mm came to mind when I was thinking of the ideal photographic lens and became an idea that I wanted to see given form at some point in the future. I'd been thinking of this lens for nearly 30 years since I was a student.

Photography is the process of compressing three-dimensional subjects into two-dimensional images, so we must consider what is preferable or what makes for a pleasant image; in other words, the optimal method of evaluating the act of compression. We refer to bokeh the point of focus as “defocusing”, and the important thing when you bokeh is how this bokeh occurs. The idea is that it is bad if only the point of focus is clear, with the surrounding area suddenly becoming bokeh or if it’s impossible to see what is depicted with patterns that didn't exist before appearing.

.....It's ideal if the bokeh has optimal depth, and the three-dimensional continuity and repeatability are good. We believe the ideal lens has continuity and a gentle feel as it defocuses. As an experiment we considered things like aberration balance and lens types and incorporated them into the 35mm f/1.4, but even with that the sharpness of the point of focus seemed skewed towards correcting aberrations. This is an issue of preference, but there weren't many lenses that didn't depict only the point of focus in portraits or other shots extremely sharply, but rather had excellent three-dimensional imaging capabilities, that portrayed everything, or the areas around the point of pleasant imaging, in a gentle manner.

I think there are other lenses out there with high resolution and MTF on the two-dimensional plane. So, rather than judging it on that point alone, I hope people will think of this 58mm as a “threedimensional hi-fi lens”. It allows the point of focus to have as much sharpness as possible while still having a gentle, continuous bokeh. You could say that the leftover design power originally dedicated to the point of focus has been shifted over to improve the three-dimensional continuity. "

It seems likely that the latest fixed focal length (prime) lenses are
the best lenses to use with high pixel count cameras ?

[Der Marketing Fritze tritt wahrscheinlich schon unter dem Tisch ]
"Sato
Actually you would be surprised by what nice of photos even the older NIKKOR lenses can take. It's almost like our forerunners who designed these lenses knew that eventually cameras like the D810 would appear so they made them adaptable. Just look at the Auto NIKKOR from the Nikon F era. I recommend the Micro-NIKKOR Auto 55mm f/3.5, for example. While some users may prefer today’s modern lenses, you may be surprised at the fact that the lens still does its work perfectly. Our predecessors definitely had some insight into the future. They didn't have the tools back then, so they tried to make everything as over-spec as they could. If you look back over the design records left by our predecessors, you can see that there are entries regarding attempts to design lenses in order to reach theoretical resolutions. Advanced design concepts like this have been used in NIKKOR lenses for decades."